1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an integrated system and method for importation, extraction, cleansing, aggregation, creation, management, transmission, taxonomy assignment, analysis and publishing of content-centric electronic catalogs, e-catalogs, or enterprise data that seamlessly integrate catalog content from potentially multiple sources for searching, analysis, and maintenance by multiple users. More particularly, this invention relates to system and method employing a content-centric framework comprising an open and fully extensible schema for the creation, management and publishing of online e-catalogs of products and services from potentially multiple internal and external sources. Most particularly, the present invention relates to a content framework or schema of pre-defined product and service classifications and workflow rules for the creation and management of catalog content. Such content can be readily customized to incorporate proprietary and legacy data in order to create, manage, publish and syndicate to e-catalogs from potentially many sources for use by potentially many users.
2. Description of the Related Art
One of the most critical components of any purchasing or selling process, or online or e-business strategy is the electronic catalog of products and services utilized for buy and sell side applications, sourcing, and inventory control and ERP systems. If items are not represented properly in an electronic catalog, any system employing the catalog can be rendered useless and frustrate users.
Existing supplier catalogs typically comprise industry and supplier specific technical terms and jargon as well as standard and ad hoc abbreviations, usually in the form of keywords and short item descriptions. Relationships between products and the type of domain they are commonly associated with, most often have been overlooked in prior art product classification schemes and search engines intended to guide users to products they seek. Almost every searcher using such systems has experienced the frustration of repeatedly trying to locate an item in such a catalog and not being able to locate the item because it is been associated with keywords or concepts not familiar to the searcher and no framework was available to guide the searcher.
Furthermore, the ability to manage suppliers, including contract compliance and strategic spend analysis, can be restricted by unusable or inaccurate historical data from multiple data processing applications, bad business processes, and non-compliance with existing policies and procedures. The ability of the data to conform to preferred internal schema, account coding, policies and procedures, is critical to the success of any purchasing or selling program.
These problems with existing catalogs and their search engines, and historical data, cannot be alleviated by standardization alone. Item descriptions, keywords, concepts, and families of goods and services that have been well established by suppliers and industries and should be the basis for guiding searches as well as for storing items for retrieval, must somehow be captured and used as templates for developing a catalog of products and services that helpfully guides users to the items they seek.
Quality of catalog content directly impacts the effectiveness of buy and sell-side processes and related data processing applications, as well as traditional ERP systems. The information stored within a catalog is only useful if it can be found and can be related to internal data processing programs and the enterprise's policies and procedures. If content is of poor quality, end users will tend to not use their systems and resort to maverick (i.e., off-contract) spending (in the case of a procurement application). In such a scenario, any benefit of price discounts, strategic sourcing, vendor contract compliance, vendor performance measurement, and other cost of ownership are lost. Furthermore, the accuracy of an enterprise's financial reporting and financial statements can be impaired by the miss-categorization of fixed assets, consumables, services, or other categories.
In addition to problems associated with enabling an e-catalog with rich content, there is the challenge of actually managing the process to obtain data from disparate supplier sources and creating an online data repository that can be used throughout an enterprise and not just as an e-catalog that supports an e-commerce platform, i.e., the challenge of providing an e-catalog that synergizes with sellers and buyers business practices.